Technical interview guide

Common Web Vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10)

The most common web application security risks, and the concrete pattern behind each one.

Read: 30 min
Practice MCQs: 25
Interview QA: 25
Edition: v3
Editorial status: Reviewed
Relevant for: Cloud Security EngineerCybersecurity EngineerFrontend EngineerIdentity and Access Management (IAM) EngineerNetwork EngineerSecurity Architect

Scope: OWASP Top 10:2025 and OWASP Cheat Sheet Series guidance accessed 2026-08-31..

Interview QA

Treat each question like a live interview question: answer out loud first (structure, assumptions, tradeoffs), then open the model answer to spot gaps and rehearse a tighter follow-up.

Curated: 2026-10-05 · Written: 2026-09-11 · Reviewed: 2026-10-03

QA-1

What is the OWASP Top 10, and how should an engineering team use the 2025 edition?

QA-2

Design broken-access-control defenses for a multi-tenant SaaS API.

QA-3

Threat-model and defend a server-side URL fetcher against SSRF.

QA-4

How do you prevent and detect security misconfiguration across cloud and application environments?

QA-5

Design a secure software supply-chain program for a web service.

QA-6

Respond to a compromised dependency or package registry incident.

QA-7

Design cryptographic protection for sensitive application data.

QA-8

How do you store and migrate user passwords safely?

QA-9

Prevent injection across SQL, shell, templates, LDAP, and rendered browser content.

QA-10

How do you prevent XSS in an application that supports rich user content?

QA-11

Run a threat model for a new payment or payout workflow.

QA-12

How do you secure business logic against replay, races, and workflow bypass?

QA-13

Design secure authentication and session lifecycles for a consumer web application.

QA-14

How do you prevent account recovery from becoming the weakest authentication path?

QA-15

How do you safely consume signed updates or serialized data from another system?

QA-16

Secure a CI/CD pipeline against software and data integrity failures.

QA-17

Design application security logging that is useful and privacy-conscious.

QA-18

How do you turn security telemetry into actionable alerting and incident response?

QA-19

Define secure exceptional-condition handling for a distributed API.

QA-20

Design idempotent payment creation under timeouts and partial failures.

QA-21

Build a modern application-security verification program around the Top 10.

QA-22

How do you triage and prioritize a newly reported vulnerability?

QA-23

How do you verify and close a security remediation?

QA-24

Threat-model a user-upload feature from request through later download.

QA-25